Republican lawmakers in North Carolina redrew the 1st Congressional District so that its Black voting-age share fell from 40% to 32%, and drew its Black Democratic congressman, Don Davis, out of it. On Tuesday the voters of the Black Belt in the state’s east decide whether the map works.
The 1st has sent a Black representative to Washington since 1992, when Eva Clayton became the first Black member of Congress from North Carolina since Reconstruction. Frank Ballance followed in 2003, G.K. Butterfield in 2004, Davis in 2023. The new map, passed in the fall of 2025 with Donald Trump’s backing, moved Davis’s home county of Greene into the neighboring Republican 3rd District.
Davis faces Laurie Buckhout, a retired Army colonel, in a rematch of 2024, when he won by less than two points. The race is widely described as the only true tossup in the Southeast.
Clayton called the plan blatant discrimination when the legislature advanced it. “If you cannot understand that as being blatant discrimination, then you don’t know what discrimination is,” she said. State Sen. Ralph Hise, who helped draw the map, said he did not use racial data. State Rep. Pricey Harrison answered that mapmakers did not need it, because the Black Belt can be seen on any map of the region.
A federal three-judge panel, all three appointed by Republican presidents, declined on Nov. 26, 2025, to block the map. The judges said the plaintiffs had not shown lawmakers acted “with the discriminatory purpose of minimizing or canceling out the voting potential of Black North Carolinians.” Senate leader Phil Berger said the ruling “thwarts the radical left’s latest attempt to circumvent the will of the people.” The map stands for this election.
The fact that cuts the other way: Davis is one of the more conservative Democrats in the House, and some voters in the district have wanted more from him. Our answer is that the seat is the point. Take away a district that elects Black representation and the next fight over a school, a clinic or a county road is held without a Black member in the room.
Black voters in the district have not waited for anyone’s permission. Early voting, which ran Oct. 15 to Oct. 31, surged past levels in earlier elections across the state, as Capital B reported from Rocky Mount. “A lot of what we’re seeing is nothing new,” said Mysha Holland, 36, a senior administrator at the Opportunities Industrialization Center of Rocky Mount. “It’s bringing out the old playbook.”
Courtney Patterson, 81, an organizer with Blueprint North Carolina, put the stakes more simply: “We should be choosing the people we elect to office.”
That is the whole argument against a gerrymander. Lawmakers picked the voters, and the voters are now showing up to pick back. Polls in North Carolina close at 7:30 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday.
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